The Plan Sénégal Emergent, launched by President Macky Sall in 2014, was the most ambitious national development framework in Senegalese history. It promised to transform Senegal into an emerging economy by 2035 through infrastructure investment, energy sector development, and agricultural modernisation. It attracted international praise, multilateral financing, and the confidence of bond markets that were willing to lend Senegal money at increasingly favourable rates because the Plan's progress appeared to match its ambitions. Between 2014 and 2023, Senegal issued multiple Eurobonds, contracted bilateral loans, accumulated private sector guarantees, and built up off-balance-sheet obligations through public-private partnerships whose fiscal cost was not reflected in the officially reported debt figures. The Plan was real in some of its infrastructure outputs. What was not real was the fiscal cost being reported to the institutions and markets that financed it. The gap between the reported figures and the actual figures was not an accounting error or a methodological difference. It was, in the words of the IMF mission head, a very conscious decision.

The Court of Auditors' report, formally titled Audit du rapport sur la situation des finances publiques: Gestions de 2019 au 31 mars 2024, was published on 12 February 2025 following a request from President Faye at the start of his administration. The Court reviewed budget execution across five full fiscal years and the first quarter of 2024. Its findings, drawn from the government's own records, established the following:

Actual public debt at end-2023 stood at 99.67% of GDP, equivalent to approximately 18,559 billion CFA francs or $28.55 billion. The Sall government had reported 74.41% of GDP to the IMF. The hidden deficit averaged approximately 5.5% of GDP per year between 2019 and 2023, implying that actual fiscal deficits averaged approximately 11% of GDP annually across the period, not the 4-6% officially reported. The 2023 fiscal deficit specifically was 10.4% of GDP, against the 4.9% reported to the IMF. The sources of the hidden obligations included: arrears owed to suppliers that were not recorded in official accounts; off-balance-sheet public-private partnership commitments whose fiscal cost was deferred and undisclosed; guarantees extended to state-owned enterprises that were not consolidated into the central government debt figures; and borrowing instruments whose terms and amounts were not fully disclosed in official reporting documents.

The misreporting was not achieved through a single instrument or a single decision. It was accumulated across five years through multiple parallel mechanisms that individually might have been explained as accounting discretion but collectively constituted a systematic pattern of fiscal data manipulation. The Court of Auditors identified four primary mechanisms.

The first was supplier arrears. The Sall government accumulated unpaid obligations to private sector suppliers of goods and services that were not recorded as debt in official accounts. Goods and services were received and delivered. Payment was deferred. The deferral was not disclosed as a current liability. The supplier arrears represented a real obligation, paid for by the suppliers themselves in the short term, that the government was carrying off-balance-sheet. When the Faye government reviewed the accounts, these arrears were among the first hidden obligations to emerge.

The second was public-private partnership commitments. The Plan Sénégal Emergent included a significant PPP component. PPP structures allow a government to contract infrastructure provision from a private operator whose financing does not appear on the government's balance sheet. The private operator recovers its investment through user fees or government payments over the life of the contract. If the government guarantee or payment commitment is not disclosed as a contingent liability, the fiscal cost of the infrastructure appears to be zero in the official accounts while the actual future obligation accumulates off-balance-sheet. The Sall government's PPP portfolio included commitments whose aggregate fiscal cost was not consolidated into official debt reporting.

The third mechanism was state-owned enterprise guarantees. The government extended guarantees to state-owned enterprises whose own debt was not consolidated into the central government accounts. When a state guarantee is called, the cost falls on the central government budget. If the guarantee is not reported as a contingent liability, the potential fiscal cost is invisible to creditors until the guarantee is activated.

The fourth was the Eurobond acceleration. Senegal issued its first sovereign Eurobond in 2009. From 2014 onwards, under the Plan Sénégal Emergent, issuance accelerated significantly. Eurobonds are priced by credit rating agencies and bond market investors based on the fiscal data that the sovereign provides. The ratings agencies, the IMF, and the investors who purchased Senegalese Eurobonds were doing so on the basis of reported debt of 74% of GDP. The actual debt was 99.67%. The spread between Senegalese Eurobonds and comparable sovereign instruments was therefore calibrated to a risk profile that did not reflect the actual fiscal position. Investors were taking more risk than they knew.

The IMF conducted annual Article IV consultations with Senegal throughout the misreporting period. It approved disbursements under its credit facilities on the basis of the reported figures. It issued positive assessments of Senegal's fiscal management that contributed to the bond market confidence that allowed Eurobond issuances to proceed at favourable rates. The question of what the IMF knew, and when it knew it, is the most analytically significant institutional accountability question in this story.

Several economists, notably former executives from the Bretton Woods institutions, are convinced the IMF knew more than it is officially acknowledging. In December 2025, during a conference in Dakar, Senegal's Minister of Justice, Yassine Fall, an economist herself, suggested that the blame was not limited to the national level alone. In December 2025, the IMF acknowledged that it had made significant progress in its internal investigation into how it failed to detect the unreported debt. The acknowledgement that there was something to investigate internally is itself a concession that the Fund's surveillance function did not perform as it should have.

The IMF's structural position in this story is analytically uncomfortable. It is simultaneously the institution whose surveillance failed to detect the misreporting, the institution whose suspension of the $1.8 billion credit facility in October 2024 imposed the most immediate fiscal pressure on the Faye government, the institution whose new programme Senegal needs to stabilise its fiscal position, and the institution whose conditions for that new programme include the fiscal reforms that the hidden debt makes more painful and more urgent than they would have been if the debt had been accurately reported throughout. The Faye government is being asked to implement IMF conditionality to clean up a fiscal mess that the IMF's own surveillance function failed to identify while it was being created.

The hidden debt is not merely a governance scandal. It is a structural constraint on the Faye government's ability to implement the sovereignty agenda it was elected to deliver. The constraint operates through three channels simultaneously.

The first is debt service. By 2019, Senegal was already spending 39% of government revenue on debt service, up from 16% in 2012. At 99.67% of GDP actual debt, and with a fiscal deficit of 13.4% of GDP in 2024, the debt service burden is consuming resources that the sovereignty agenda requires for port development, sovereign wealth fund capitalisation, agricultural investment, health and education reform. In March 2026, the Faye government used Total Return Swaps to make $480 million in payments to international bondholders. The sovereign is paying creditors with instruments it borrowed from other creditors. The fiscal space for discretionary investment is minimal.

The second is the IMF programme constraint. The Faye government needs a new IMF programme to access concessional financing and to signal fiscal credibility to bond markets. The IMF's conditions for that programme include fiscal consolidation measures, debt management reforms, and governance improvements that constrain the government's ability to spend on the sovereignty agenda in the short term. In February 2026, Finance Minister Diba acknowledged that fundamental differences remained with the IMF. The programme has not been finalised as of the time of writing.

The third is the political economy constraint. The rupture between Faye and Sonko documented in Article 2 of this series was triggered in part by the IMF engagement question. Sonko's position was that engaging the IMF on the Fund's terms was a capitulation to the same neocolonial financial architecture the sovereignty agenda was designed to challenge. Faye's position was that the inherited fiscal position left no alternative to credible engagement with international creditors. The hidden debt that neither man created has forced the most ideologically significant division in the government's first two years.